The present application relates generally to an improved data processing apparatus and method and more specifically to mechanisms for incremental runtime compliance validation of renderable objects.
Most commonly used integrated development environments (IDEs) today have a debugging infrastructure. The debugging infrastructure, or “debugger,” allows the developer to incrementally study a running program by examining its components at runtime by inspecting elements of those components at specified points of execution. Such elements include variables and their values, the runtime stack, flow control analysis, thread states, and other low-level features of the running application's modules. In object-oriented languages, such as Java™, available from Sun Microsystems, debuggers also reveal the internal data structure of runtime objects, values of their data members, and insights into the polymorphic behavior of runtime objects.
Thus, debuggers are quite sufficient for low-level testing of business logic or the flow of standard processing. However, debuggers typically do not provide support for analyzing higher-level components at runtime, i.e. the types of components that are, for example, the constituents of a graphical user interface (GUI). For instances, debuggers cannot reveal anything about a component's relationship to other components in the GUI hierarchy or the extent to which a component, at a given instance, complies with certain criteria as a developer steps through the code that creates, configures, and reveals that component. In other words, incremental analysis of a richer set of features or properties germane to GUI components is missing from modern-day debuggers.